During the summer, I got my hands on an iPad pro. I was a bit skeptic to start with, but after trying it it for some few days, I was convinced that this is the best buy I’ve done in some years.

My earlier frustrations, after being a digital artist, is that I could never handle the sketching process in Photoshop with my wacom tablet. It always felt so hard to do the sketching there. Like I did no have complete control over what I was doing and seeing. The iPad solves that problem for me.

Sketching in the iPad, is like sketching by hand. The best part of it is that I can draw digitally everywhere (except for outside under the sun). There is something that is so freeing, sitting in the couch, sketching digitally. I absolutely love it.
If I’m gonna draw on my iMac in Photoshop, it takes way more effort from me – after spending 8 hours at my day job. It’s not always that tempting to sit down on a chair again.

In other words, the iPad and Procreate makes me draw way more than what I did before I got my hands on it.

The only downside about it, is that I don’t have as much control painting as I do in Photoshop. I think the brushes in Procreate are hard to work around. But in terms of sketching and doing line art (!!!), it’s the perfect tool. Where photoshop can’t help me, the Ipad and procreate can.
The program also has some nice perspective features as well as all your files being Photoshop compatible (with layers even).

8 – 10 of September I spent my weekend together with my art friends in Germany, Frankfurt of all places. My friends and I decided that a digital art conference in Frankfurt sounded like a good idea.

Xiang He and I had an early morning flight at 6 am, but we were too excited about the conference to care about little sleep.

Friday was spent listening to talks from really good artists and catching up with June and Anne Marte. I was also introduced to Simon, great artist. It feels so great to be among so many good artists, talking about art, without bothering others with your blabbering. It feels so inspirational, and I was so happy to see so many digital artists gathered at one place. I’ve always felt that digital artists have been a bit misunderstood, but we are slowly getting acknowledged for doing real art. It is way too easy to assume that you are pressing some buttons, and voila, your artwork appears.

A lot of interesting things were said during the lectures and demos, but a topic I found rather interesting was when one of the lecturers were talking about his character design work for a game, where the bad guys in reality wasn’t that bad. He held an interesting lecture on how to make your characters look more evil, so that the players of the game, actually feels that it is morally correct to attack and shoot these creatures/bad guys. In order to do that, he added stories to his characters. One was a child abductor, another ate humans and so on. From these stories made in his mind, he added details like bones, skulls and so on. Was really interesting and something I haven’t really thought too much about when designing the bad guys for my client.

All in all, it was like a morality talk on how to convince the viewers of the game to feel the evilness from the characters in the game. There were other interesting lectures, but this was the one that spoke to me.